Ever since the newspaper industry and TV began chasing the Internet Express, trying to catch up with the fast-changing way in which news was being gathered and reported, the news media’s credibility has sunk ever lower.
I don’t really know how it could have been avoided because if the old-line media organizations had not jumped on board — however awkwardly — they would have been left farther behind than they are. Still, this loss of credibility is just appalling to me and many other past and present members of the media.
What I’m talking about is the old media lowering the accuracy and editing bar that it had painstakingly established over generations. The first big belly dive into the mud occurred the night of the 2000 presidential election, when the major networks, including CNN and Fox, called Florida for Al Gore prematurely and later stamped George Bush as the winner of the presidential election — 19 days before the Florida vote count was certified and Bush declared the winner by 500 some votes.
As I recall, we at The Star were one of many news organizations that had Bush winning on our Web site. I believe that in the morning paper, we went with too close to call.
All in all, the media’s performance that night made the classic, 1948 Chicago Tribune headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” start to seem not so embarrassing in retrospect.
There have been many other erroneous, main-line-media Web site reports since the 2000 presidential election, but this week brought another new low: The Associated Press, The Boston Globe, CNN and Fox News all reported early Wednesday afternoon that an arrest had been made in the Boston bombings case, when, in fact, no arrest had been made.
A story by Bill Carter in yesterday’s New York Times said that CNN and Fox “spent about an hour discussing the news of an arrest with various correspondents and experts before backing off when they received further information.”
It was the same two networks that breathlessly reported — again erroneously — last June that the Supreme Court had overturned President Obama’s health-care-overhaul law.
I guess officials at some of these networks have come to the conclusion that if you don’t know for sure, run it anyway because it will seem to advance the story.
The last thing the network executives want, it seems, is anchors and reporters saying, “We’re waiting for new information.” The new credo at some networks and newspapers is There Can Be No Wait; It Must Be Now!
CNN’s John King was the first to set his network’s pants on fire when, at 12:45 p.m. Kansas City time, he reported that police had a bombing suspect in custody.
In his NYT story, Carter said that about 1:45 p.m., “one of CNN’s law enforcement experts…appeared on the air and reported and reported that he had three sources who assured him no arrest had been made.”
And how did CNN explain its screw-up? It issued this statement:
“CNN had three credible sources on both local and federal levels. Based on this information we reported our findings.”
Their “findings” were nothing more than “phantom findings,” and CNN should have apologized.
The Associated Press also didn’t see fit to extend its regrets about its messy reporting. Carter wrote: “Paul Colford, a spokesman for The Associated Press, said later in the afternoon that the news service did not ‘pull back’ from its original reporting, but only ‘added other reporting.’ ”
Well, now, that’s a fine kettle of fish, isn’t it? “Added other reporting…”
As the reactions of CNN and the AP indicate, the worst part of this “it-could-be-right-or-it-could-be-wrong” approach to Internet-era reporting is that there’s no need to apologize, no need to be embarrassed, just keep rolling out whatever some ding-dong whispers to the stressed-out, over-caffeinated reporters in the field.
Culminating his story, Carter quoted Judy Muller, a former network news correspondent who teaches journalism at the University of Southern California. She said:
“The rush to be first has so thoroughly swallowed up the principal of being right and first that it seems a little egg on the face is now deemed worth the risk.”
Quite often, people ask me if I miss working as a journalist. I always say that I don’t miss it at all and that I am happy to be out.
I respect the vast majority of journalists, especially my former Star colleagues, but I’ve got to say that when we started chasing the Internet back in the late 1990s, our “quality control” system — based on verified reporting, careful copy editing and several sets of eyes on every story in line for publication — quickly went to hell.
I could not come to grips with throwing under-reported, poorly edited stories up on the Web just to try to keep up with the local TV stations.
As a result of the free-wheeling reporting that has supplanted careful, verified reporting, the reputation of American journalism has, sorrowfully, slipped into a huge sinkhole, and I don’t know how it’s going to get out. It looks like it could go the route of that guy in Florida who was swallowed up by the earth and never resurfaced.
***
All that is not to say that some newspapers and networks have not done great things in opening new doors afforded by the Internet. For example, perhaps you saw that The New York Times won four Pulitzer prizes this week, for stories published in 2012, including John Branch’s spectacular feature “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” I wrote admiringly about that story in December, a few days after it was published. I quoted Rebecca Greenfield of The Atlantic Wire Web, who said that the project “makes multimedia feel natural and useful, not just tacked on.”
The Times, with pockets deep enough to hire experts in every dimension of news gathering and presentation, has done the best job of melding newsprint journalism and electronic journalism. It also has resisted the urge, for the most part, to go with unverified reports in the race to be first on big stories. But, alas, even The Times got sucked in on the Bush “victory” on election night 2000.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Karl Rove did the same thing Election Night 2012, resulting in some kind of suspension. Rove would not move off his commentary that Gov. Romney was going to win the election.
Jim you have never been more correct. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have thought to myself, “How could they…?”
We went through these issues; I would rather have been accurate and second.
To its credit, Larry, Fox News stood up to Rove on election night: He was strongly questioning the network’s prediction that Obama would win Ohio, and Fox stood behind its numbers, even interviewing its numbers guru on the air. As a result of the flap, Rove was temporarily “benched” as a Fox commentator. He was back about a month later, however.
Like me, you were at The Star when accuracy and verification were the bywords. We still made plenty of errors, but most were pretty small in the scope of things. And inside the building, even those made everyone — reporters and editors alike — grind their teeth. Those were the days, eh?
Great post, Fitz! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Sad state of the “news” business today. It’s no longer a news business as much as it is a ratings business. Who’s first is more important than who’s right, much less right or left of the regimes’ current agenda. Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust but verify.” In the news business, problem is, there is no one you can trust.
Just what I mean about shaken credibility.
But wait..there’s more…Page A-10, KC Star headline — “Teen stunned at mistaken link to bombing.”
“A teenager (Salah Eddin Barhoum) said he is scared to go outside after he was portrayed on the Internet and on the front page of the New York Post as connected to the Boston Marathon bombings.”
The Post reported later Thursday that the men (Salah and a friend) weren’t considered suspects. But New York Post editor Col Allan said: “We stand by our story. The image was mailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.”
Nope, we just put their pictures on the front page beside the bombing story and let you, the reader, make up your own mind…Hmmm. One wonders was the non-suspect statement big, front-page news, too?
Shoot first and don’t bother asking questions later. Hell, just keep shooting, you’re bound to hit something.
Jayson
It is the news BUSINESS.
My mentor in college was Barry Nimcoff. He was literally carried kicking and screaming from The Philadelphia Inquirer to WPVI-TV. Annenberg had just bought the station (before the SC ruling) and was staffing the news station from reporters.
When he worked for CBS News he said many a day they would begin their daily planning meeting and wonder how they would ever fill 15 minutes.
Sounding like the ol’ coot yelling at the kids to get off the lawn, journalism school is staffed by folks who never worked in the media. Never wrote for a newspaper, magazine or radio/tv.
The days when the broadcast media were required to serve in the public interest are long gone.
It’s a war of survival in print & broadcast media. And they say the first casualty in war is truth.
“Stop The Presses!!”
Change born of hope is a dicey proposition, but let us hope the MSM will aquiesce to the ascendancy of the social media “town crier” in the race to bring breaking news into a 21st century public square. My own guess, is that we hoi polloi are far less interested in whether or not CNN gets the news before Fox and are far more interested in the spin and agenda on ANY breaking news at this point. Politics and the Culture War now reduce any and all news to weopons and opportunities.
The diminishing number of actual reporters on scene for day to day coverage of mundane events is noted here in an article which calls reporters “megaphones” as opposed to reporters.
http://www.prsa.org/SearchResults/view/10114/105/Report_Original_reporting_drops_as_agenda_driven_n
Rushing announcements at the expense of accuracy is born of the agenda driven 24/7 news cycle that seeks to convince rather than inform. Glossing over the foibles on the Right (“Weapons of Mass Destruction”, wasted lives, fortunes and sacred honor.) and the Left (Trillions down the Civil Rights Rat Hole, begetting the Racism Industrial Complex, wasted lives, fortunes sans the honor.) by the 4th Estate diminishes the trust and faith in heretofore journalistic grand sachems who resemble puritanical fame whores on reality shows more than arbiters of propriety.
The internet’s intractable incursion into every day life, more and more, forces those folks, normally with only a cursory interest in the news, to face day to day reality and wish indeed that that poison was hid with more “suger’d words”.
Reckless journalistic celerity is another sign of journalistic entropy which in turn is the result of increased competition for the hearts and minds of Americans in the Culture War. You can count on one thing in this war, bellum se ipsum alet.
Chuck — When you say “MSM,” are you talking about methylsulfonylmethane? Or something else?
Liberal bias in the news?
Say it ain’t so!
http://archive.mrc.org/biasbasics/biasbasics2.asp
My favorite, LMAO!!! is Nina Totenberg from NPR.
“Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: “Is this attack [on public broadcasting’s budget] going to make NPR a little less liberal?”
NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg: “I don’t think we’re liberal to begin with and I think if you would listen, Evan, you would know that.”
Thomas: “I do listen to you and you’re not that liberal, but you’re a little bit liberal.”
Totenberg: “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, I really don’t — any more than, any more than you would say that Newsweek is liberal.”
Thomas: “I think Newsweek is a little liberal.”
— Exchange on the June 26, 2005 Inside Washington.
Wow. Just wow…
Readers — Referring to the Urban Dictionary, I found out that LMAO means Laughing My Ass Off. Chuck is hip; I’m not, and I’m assuming that some of you aren’t, either.
I’m more frustrated by the stories that aren’t run simply to spare media favorites embarrassments. The current spiking of the Kermit Gosnell story is the perfect example as is the ongoing failure of the media to adequately cover King Hussein. Here locally Derek Schmidt admitted in an AP story that he has been violating Kansas statutes with regard to handling CCH applications, The Star was aware of the story, and the Wichita Eagle ran the AP piece, but The Star remains silent because they hate guns and gun owners. It’s become so bad among the establishment media that I get the feeling that we’re living behind the iron curtain..
Anarcho Tyranny. Hate the game, not the author.
That is hip too Fitz.
Here is the New York Times spin on the Boston Bombings.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/the_tsarnaev_meme_wars_begin.html
They use the MSM word again.
:)
Finally, I get it, Chuck — mainstream media. Not only am I not hip, I’m sometimes I’m a little thick, too…Thanks for the forbearance.
Fitz, you’ve done some of your finest work since you’ve left The Star. One of my biggest gripes is that The Star takes some of the finest journalistic talent around and turns their work into mediocrity. Fire the editorial board and use the money to hire back guys like Karash and turn them loose and I’d subscribe to the damn thing.
If the Star would do that I could quit going to therapy. Save me $100.00 a week. I’d glady pay half of that to the Star.
Gladly! All typos are courtesy of Steve Jobs and the iPad.
From debka.com
The Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis April 20, 2013, 4:39 PM (GMT+02:00)
The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT – and Dzohkhar’s capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown.
The conclusion reached by debkafile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.
Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.
By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus.
This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of.
Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands.
They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.
That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”
Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.
The Tsarnaevs’ recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:
1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.
He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media.
Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect
3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.
Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington – this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.
Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:
In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor.
He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.
On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi, having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the country.
Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a group of French military commandoes.
The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed.
An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns. President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant” and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.
According to debkafile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators’ agenda:
a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?
b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States – particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?
c) What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?
Pretty interesting stuff smarty.
How credible do you think that is?
I think you’ve got a novel in you, Smartman…You just wrote Chapter 1!
Chuck, debka seems highly credible. This story answers a whole lot of questions about why there were so many delays in the government giving us updates. They probably knew on Tuesday it was the Tsarnaev brothers since they were on the “payroll”. They needed to create a narrative and some optics to give themselves some distance and deniability.
All I know is that whoever the Tsarnaev’s handler was is in heap big trouble. Will be interesting to see how the MSM treats this.
Glenn Beck has called the President out as well. Says he is giving him until Monday to fess up or Beck will do it for him. Beck has very, very close relationships with the Israeli government. I suspect there may be some connection between the debka and Beck stories.
Gonna be a fun week.
Now nine days into the new paper route, I decided it was about time to come up for some air, and I’m sure glad I did, especially after seeing this particular post. Jim, the only thing worse than a news entity that is first with the news and wrong is a news entity that is first with the news and wrong and refuses to publicly apologize for the inaccurate information it delivered to the masses, choosing instead to hide behind the ever-convenient facade encompassed by the words “added other reporting.” How sad! How dishonest! How arrogant! So given a choice between listening to Fox Noise (err, News) bring me the news first and getting it wrong or waiting for The Star to come out in the morning and having it right, I’ll take The Star every time. And in the event that The Star gets it wrong, I fully expect the paper to readily own up to the error and do a better job of verifying and confirming in the future.
Good to hear from you, Rick…I’m glad you’ve got some steady work now.